Remember the guy who wouldn’t take the flag pole down on his Virginia property a while back?
You might remember the news story several months ago about a crotchety old man in Virginia who defied his local Homeowners Association, and refused to take down the flag pole on his property along with the large American flag he flew on it.

Now we learn who that old man was. On June 15, 1919, Van T. Barfoot was born in Edinburg, Texas. That probably didn’t make news back then.

But twenty-five years later, on May 23, 1944, near Carano, Italy, that same Van T. Barfoot, who had in 1940 enlisted in the U.S. Army, set out alone to flank German machine gun positions from which gunfire was raining down on his fellow soldiers. His advance took him through a minefield but having done so, he proceeded to single-handedly take out three enemy machine gun positions, returning with 17 prisoners of war.

And if that weren’t enough for a day’s work, he later took on and destroyed three German tanks
sent to retake the machine gun positions.

That probably didn’t make much news either, given the scope of the war, but it did earn Van T. Barfoot, who retired as a Colonel after also serving in Korea and Vietnam, a well deserved Medal of Honor.

What did make news…Was his Neighborhood Association’s quibble with how the 90-year-old veteran chose to fly the American flag outside his suburban Virginia home. Seems the HOA rules said it was OK to fly a flag on a house-mounted bracket, but, for decorum, items such as Barfoot’s 21-foot flagpole were “unsuitable”.

Van Barfoot had been denied a permit for the pole, but erected it anyway and was facing court action unless he agreed to take it down.

Then the HOA story made national TV, and the Neighborhood Association rethought its position and agreed to indulge this aging hero who dwelt among them.

“In the time I have left”, he said to the Associated Press, “I plan to continue to fly the
American flag without interference.”

As well he should. And if any of his neighbors had taken a notion to contest him further, they might have done well to read his Medal of Honor citation first. Seems it indicates Mr. Van Barfoot wasn’t particularly good at backing down.

WE ONLY LIVE IN THE LAND OF THE FREE BECAUSE OF THE BRAVE! AND, BECAUSE OF OLD MEN LIKE VAN BARFOOT!

Now, let’s contrast this with you, Colin Kaepernick. Raised in a home of privilege, given a college education, and then given the opportunity to make millions of dollars for playing a fucking game.

And what do you do? You choose to purposely insult the likes of Van T. Barfoot with your disrespectful disregard of our country’s national anthem.

Our Constitution gives you the right to do what you want, but when you insult the greatest nation on Earth with your shallow protest, one thing comes to mind to me – Colin Kaepernick, you’re no Van T Barfoot. You have shamed yourself and your family with your antics. Go to hell Colin.

If you read that headline, you’re probably wondering ‘WTF does that mean?’. Well, Working on working is something that I think about all the time. You see, you can work on a project. You can work on your lawn. You can work on your attitude. But I think a lot of people need to ‘work on working’. In other words, just learn to work better all the time. Steven Pressfield has a great book that is available for free through Kindle or as a PDF from several locations, called “Do the Work” .

It’s an awesome book about simply getting the work done. I think the book is great and straight to the point. Definitely a great starting point for people to get off their asses and get shit done.

I think that those of us that don’t work with strict deadlines have it worse than those that have strict cutoffs forced on them by someone else or some conditions that require a deadline. In contrast to deadlines, as an independent entrepreneur, I don’t have anyone to corral me in and make me finish on time.

I saw a great TED video on the subject. Check this out….

You see what I mean. Procrastination is way worse without the ‘deadline monster’.

This week, I tried putting my own artificial deadlines on stuff. Monday, I felt like I should do 15 sales phone calls. I was getting ready to get on a flight from Las Vegas to Lake Tahoe and I thought, “I’m gonna make the boarding of the flight my deadline for those calls”.

So I grabbed my computer and my phone and started making the calls. My rule for myself was a minimum of fifteen calls in an hour and a half. I made calls relentlessly. About 8 calls in I was in touch with someone that was extremely interested in what I was offering and agreed to give me a trial run for my services at $25k per year. He gave me a verbal commitment. I got off the phone, documented it, and kept making calls. By boarding time, not only did I get the calls done, but I made $25,000 and had a backup offer from another guy. BOOM!

Then, unfortunately, I let shit slide for the next few days. Didn’t set a deadline for anything. Didn’t achieve anything notable through EOD Thursday. I actually started to get depressed about it. So Friday, I made a plan to start and finish developing a new website for a buddy of mine. He has a restaurant hood cleaning service in Las Vegas and needed a new website. So, I said to myself, “Okay JR. Time to get shit done. You’re going to create this site from scratch and have it 100% completed by Sunday.

I started working on http://lasvegashoodcleaning.com that night and went balls to the walls on Saturday. By 8pm Saturday night, the site was completely built and I submitted it to Google for indexing.

Lesson learned. Deadlines work. I imagine that real deadlines work better, but with the right motivation, why couldn’t self imposed deadlines be just as effective?

The Republican Party has, for the past 7 years, allowed the deficit to explode to nearly $20 trillion, passed Obamacare, and helped to pass the Iranian Nuclear Treaty. In the 2014 midterms, Republicans begged America that if they would vote to create Republican majorities in both Congress and Senate, there would be a “Republican Revolution” to overthrow Obama’s draconian and failed policies. The sad reality is here we are in 2016, and still waiting for that “revolution” to materialize. Donald Trump is the first real, organic excitement in the Republican Party since Ronald Reagan in 1980.

But if the GOP forces a brokered convention in CLEAR violation of the will of the American people, I will call for open revolution against the Republican Party and become an Independent. And I will take as many people with me as possible.

Your move, GOP, choose wisely. The future of the Republican Party hangs in the balance.Game on.

If you find that you’re website hase been un-indexed at Google, or de-indexed, as long as you have not been totally blocked because of an SEO issue, this might be the issue.

This is pretty amazing! If you don’t block your archives from being indexed, it looks like the same content repeated many times. And Google hates that!

So, if you have Yoast SEO on your website, follow the steps in the video so that you can clean it up. If you don’t have Yoast SEO installed – you should do so, and then make the changes outlined in the video.

Thanks to the guys at Source Wave for pointing this out in their video. It’s amazing how this can be biting us in the bottom regarding ranking at Google.

So, here’s the steps, just in case you have no desire to watch the video:

Go to taxonomies in Yoast SEO plugins. Click on no-index under all the items listed there. This includes Categories, Tags, Format, etc.

Go to Archives and click on the settings for author archives and archives.

Pretty simple, right? Give it a go. I’m pretty sure it will help you to get re-indexed ad Google.

I sometimes think that Google thrives on driving people crazy. I recently bought a domain qualityappliancerepairhouston.com because it had 200+ backlinks to it, a very low spam count against it. So, I thought this would be a domain with very good authority. So I went through the usual steps that you would take to get a site indexed in Google. It’s been a solid week and Google has not indexed any of the pages. So weird.

You would think that with 200+ sites having links to it – that Google would look at it and see the new pages. I’m not sure what to do. Maybe I will sell it to someone that wants a domain that would be really strong for an appliance repair company in Houston.

This is when I really start to doubt everything that I have learned about SEO. Seriously. If I can’t even get a simple appliance repair site to show up in the rankings at all – what good is even trying? Can I push a site anymore? I hate to see all these guys out there that are selling information about how to do it and it appears to all be bullshit.

I’ve paid for SEO training – and I see so many guys touting that their methods work so well – but I see very similar stuff between all of them and most of it works just to a certain point. To use appliance repair as an example, If I look at all the data for appliance repair in Houston and the suburbs, I see that some really crappy sites that are not mobile responsive and have obvious keyword stuffing, actually rank really well. But why? Everything I read says that the big G will kick your ass for not being mobile responsive now. But keyword stuffing? That’s been a no-no for the last several years. So how can an appliance repair website in a city the size of Houston still rank so well if they’re breaking all of the new search rules?

Maybe the big G has some algorithm that allows a stuffed site to rank when it has age behind it? I don’t know. But whatever it is – I think that it diminishes the value of anything that the big SEO guys are pushing as their grand solution.

Yesterday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid joined the attacks on Nevada citizens who are seeking to repeal the $1.4 billion tax hike passed by the 2015 Legislature and signed into law by Gov. Brian “America’s Worst Governor” Sandoval despite the fact that not one of them last year campaigned on such a tax hike and despite the fact that almost 80 percent of Nevada voters rejected the gross receipts tax component at the ballot box last November.

In an interview with Michelle Rindels of the Associated Press, Reid vowed to do “everything I can” to stop our tax repeal effort, declaring that “it would be a real disservice to our state if the crazies were able to prevail.”

“Crazies.”

Nice.

He sounds like liberal blogger Jon Ralston.

From the AP story…

“Sen. Harry Reid said he’s willing to do everything he can to help Gov. Brian Sandoval’s $1.1 billion tax package survive a potential challenge at the ballot, even though he’s not actively involved in the fight now.

“The Democratic U.S. Senate leader had high praise for the Republican governor during an interview Thursday in his Reno office.

“’Sandoval and I don’t agree on stuff, but we agree on a lot, and I think what he was able to do with that Legislature was masterful,’ Reid said. ‘I think it would be a real disservice to our state if the crazies were able to prevail.’

“While the tax package garnered more than the necessary two-thirds vote in the Republican controlled Legislature this spring, conservative opponents say it was adopted against the will of voters who overwhelmingly rejected the margins tax on the 2014 ballot.

“One group has filed a long-shot petition to repeal the entire three-part package, while another group is planning a campaign to repeal just one portion of it. Republican state Controller Ron Knecht, who’s involved in the latter effort, said organizers might file a petition as early as next week.”

Speaking of Knecht’s group, it has now officially filed their PAC (political action committee) with the Secretary of State. “RIP Commerce Tax, Inc.” lists the following officers…

I’ve been a Nevada resident all my life.I’m an entrepreneur and having my businesses based in Nevada has always been beneficial to me. Until now.

In the last legislative session, The Governor of the Great State of Nevada, Brian Sandoval, made a decision to push through new taxes and fees on companies in Nevada, or having their corporations based in Nevada.His move to do this was through legislation that was precisely the same as a bill that had been turned down by the majority of voters in the State in the previous voting cycle.So that is my ‘why’.

Now the ‘how’ and the great benefits that me and my little network of corporations and LLC’s are getting.LOWER FEES and less government intrusion.Yes, Wyoming is welcoming me with open arms!

I contacted Wyoming Discount Registered Agent and spoke at length about this with Polly.Polly told me that they had suspected that this was going to happen and they set everything up so that they could help their Nevada clients realize the benefits of moving their corporations to Wyoming.And they wanted to be the best professionals at making the transition inexpensive and painless.For me, it cost less to move my companies than it would have cost in the increases that I would have had, leaving my companies in Nevada.

So, If you want to save money, or you just want to Let the Governor know what a mistake he made by going against the will of his constituents, you should look into making the move to Wyoming (for your corporations).